Biomass Electricity More Polluting Than Coal

Biomass electricity generation, a heavily subsidized form of “green” energy that relies primarily on the burning of wood, is more polluting and worse for the climate than coal, according to a new analysis of 88 pollution permits for biomass power plants in 25 states.

The report found that although wood-burning power plants are often promoted as being good for the climate and carbon neutral, the low efficiency of plants means that they emit almost 50 percent more CO2 than coal per unit of energy produced. Photo credit: Global Justice Ecological Project

Trees, Trash, and Toxics: How Biomass Energy Has Become the New Coal, released this week and delivered to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by the Partnership for Policy Integrity (PFPI), concludes that biomass power plants across the country are permitted to emit more pollution than comparable coal plants or commercial waste incinerators, even as they are subsidized by state and federal renewable energy dollars. It contains detailed emissions and fuel specifications for a number of facilities, including plants in California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

“The biomass power industry portrays their facilities as ‘clean,’” said Mary Booth, director of PFPI and author of the report. “But we found that even the newest biomass plants are allowed to pollute more than modern coal- and gas-fired plants, and that pollution from bioenergy is increasingly unregulated.”

The report found that biomass power is given special treatment and held to lax pollution control standards, compared to fossil-fueled power plants.

Biomass plants are dirty because they are markedly inefficient. The report found that per megawatt-hour, a biomass power plant employing “best available control technology” emits more nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, particulate matter and carbon monoxide than a modern coal plant of the same size.

Almost half the facilities analyzed, however, avoided using BACT by claiming to be “minor” sources of pollution that skim under the triggering threshold for stricter pollution controls. Minor source permits are issued by the states and contain none of the protective measures required under federal air pollution permitting.

“The American Lung Association has opposed granting renewable energy subsidies for biomass combustion precisely because it is so polluting,” said Jeff Seyler, president and CEO of the American Lung Association of the Northeast. “Why we are using taxpayer dollars to subsidize power plants that are more polluting than coal?”

The analysis also found that although wood-burning power plants are often promoted as being good for the climate and carbon neutral, the low efficiency of plants means that they emit almost 50 percent more CO2 than coal per unit of energy produced. Current science shows that while emissions of CO2 from biomass burning can theoretically be offset over time by forest regrowth and other means, such offsets typically take several decades to fully compensate for the CO2 emitted during plant operation. None of the permits analyzed in the report required proof that carbon emissions would be offset.

EPA rules also allow biomass plants to emit more hazardous air pollutants than both coal plants and industrial waste incinerators, including heavy metals and dioxins. Even with these weak rules, most biomass plants avoid restrictions on the amount of toxic air pollution they can emit by claiming to be minor sources, and permits usually require little testing for proof of actual emissions. When regulated as a minor source, a facility is not required to meet any limitations on emissions of hazardous air pollutants.

The potential for biomass power plants to emit heavy metals and other air toxics is increasing, because new EPA rules allow burning more demolition debris and other contaminated wastes in biomass power plants, including, EPA says, materials that are as contaminated as coal. A majority of the facilities reviewed in the report allowed burning demolition debris and other waste wood.

“Lax regulations that allow contaminated wastes to be burned as biomass mean that communities need to protect themselves,” said Mary Booth. “They can’t count on the air permitting process to ensure that bioenergy pollution is minimized.”

Comments

Yvette Graham

Biomass plants using plasma technology such as ours at Utag Green Energy Technologies have virtually no emissions, so this article is misleading.

Seeds of death

Coal needs to be dug up, processed and transported. Burning trash for energy is a good idea because it needs to go somewhere and it would only rot releasing methane in a landfill. Some more emission cleaning technology is needed.

N. MacRae

Very lazy and potentially detrimental article to alternative sources of clean energy from biomass. This article specifically is talking about direct biomass combustion – just plain “burning” would have been more correct and descriptive – which is far from the only way biomass can be used to generate electricity. You stand to hurt more progressive and far cleaner ways to glean energy and reuseable resources from biomass (gassification, biofuel generation, mesophilic wastewater processing) and, instead, you help to tie the terms “biomass electricity production” to the laziest, dirtiest methods. To call the burning of wood waste and construction waste “biomass electricity” production is to greenwash in the worst way. Please don’t help Coal especially to paint this picture. The other side to this is that the burning of wood waste is not reintroducing carbon into the atmosphere that was more than tens of thousands of years old, already happily geologically sequestered and which requires huge and destructive carbon-intensive industry to dig up.

Mack

Another tedious report from Partnership for Policy Integrity
purporting beliefs in renewable biomass energy using simplistic calculations
and non-standard interpretation of air quality permits. Innumerable footnotes in this report
indicate very little original research, just rehashing already published
data.

PFPI hints at being a “nonprofit” but this group is not registered with the State Of Massachusetts
nor are there any filings of the IRS Form 990 on record. Financing of PFPI is unknown. Could this group be funded by pro-hydrofracking sources in order to shift sentiment on electrical generation from renewable biomass to the finite natural gas supply in the United States?

http://www.bbnworld.com Frank Choi

We cannot close biomass and coal fired power plant because of pollution and should find out solution

to reduce pollution and fuel consumption. Plasma would be one of the best solution to reduce pollution

but it costs too much to replace the plant completely and if we build new, there are an innovative way of reduction of pollution.. by upgrading of existed coal or biomass power plant. For the new plant or replacement of burning system, zero waste, magma solution would be much better solution than

the Plasma gasification.

DOE and a lot of research institute have already invested a lot of time, effort and investment for the

application of Hydrogen to coal burning furnace and proved to be the best way of increasing burning efficiency and could save over 30% of biomass and coals as well as 80-90% of smoke stack and emissions without investment of infrastructure.

However, the problem using hydrogen is the cost of producing Hydrogen but now we can produce

hydro-oxygen gas from water by electrolyzer at the affordable price .. and it is proved that use of hydro-oxygen gas will produce much less NOx than hydrogen with air..because Hydro-Oxygen gas will use its own oxygen for firing.

Here is brochures about Hydro-Oxygen generator, ( http://www.bbnworld.net/brown/hhocoal.pdf )which can produce hydro-oxygen permanently from tap water without further investment once it is installed. It will be cheapest and fastest solution to reduce pollution by adding generator to the existed facility.

The multipurpose smelting unit MAGMA provides autogenous technology of high-temperature recycling of unsorted municipal waste on a layer of molten over-heated slag that forms from mineral components of waste and fluxes specifically added in the process of recycling.

Temperature of the working space of the smelting chamber over the layer of molten slag is 1800-1900°С and temperature of slag is 1400-1650°С. Under such conditions, the selected speed of waste feeding, the weight of molten slag and the dimensions of the smelting chamber produce a «thermal shock», under which the fed waste is immediately heated up to high temperatures that rule out the possibility of formation of dioxins.